“Too many tenants across the country are living in apartments with unpaid rent piling up, and landlords are facing their second straight year unable to evict people who don’t pay them. The stakes are enormous: a recent study by professors at UCLA and USC estimate that tenants owe $3 billion in back rent in Los Angeles County alone. A recent survey from the Urban Institute noted that a total of 28 percent of landlords have deferred maintenance during the pandemic, the majority citing financial reasons for doing so. Further, 27 percent of tenants reported their maintenance requests were being ignored completely.
In theory, Washington has allocated billions of dollars for rent support for both tenants and the landlords hurt by the moratorium. But in practice that money isn’t going where it needs to go. As of the end of June, only 12 percent of the originally approved $25 billion in rental assistance had reached tenants in need. Still, even if all of the dollars allocated for rental assistance were currently in the hands of renters in need, it still won’t be enough. As Urban Institute researchers concluded that $50 billion is the minimum needed and a CityLab report suggests that it could be over $70 billion.”
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“The cleanest solution would be a government-financed loan program that would benefit both tenants and landlords. It needs to be federal. At this point, only Washington has the scale and scope to head off a crisis whose costs have the potential to tick into the tens of billions with far-reaching, long-term impacts on renters. It needs to provide landlords an immediate guarantee of the recovery of a substantial portion of back rent so that the rental market will restabilize. And a loan program, rather than additional rental assistance to tenants or landlords, solves several of the underlying issues: Tenants do owe back rent, and to pretend otherwise could invite moral hazard on a huge scale. It’s politically more viable, in part, because directly footing a future bill that remains unknown would leave American taxpayers with additional Covid debt beyond the direct costs of the pandemic.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/10/eviction-moratorium-renters-landlord-covid-503352